Recent Bookmarks

Moving my focus from a wiki to a blog

For the last few years, my personal website has pointed at my wiki. I use a wiki as a way of keeping notes, usually on I.T. related topics. These notes were primarily intended for my own personal use, but if anyone else happened to find anything useful, then I was happy to share my knowledge. My wiki is powered by DokuWiki, a fantastic open source application, which I prefer over the more popular MediaWiki for two reasons main reasons:

I find the markup much more readable

The topics are stored as flat text files instead of in a database

These two aspects of DokuWiki’s implemention are important to me, as I frequently read my wiki pages as raw markup instead of browsing the wiki over the web. I keep a copy of the wiki synced with my iPhone, so I can get to my notes from anywhere without having to connect to the internet.

DokuWiki has served me well for some time now, but I am aware that it isn’t ideal as my primary web presence. A client who visited my website recently expressed confusion when he was greeted with a contents page full of technical jargon. It has always been my intention to start a blog, but I spent far too much time trying to make a choice between the numerousbloggingengines the world has to offer. Now that I have started working with Wordpress, I am happy that I have made the right descision. I will continue to keep notes in my wiki, but I will make an effort to rewrite the more mature and useful topics as more coherent blog posts, hopefully suitable for the consumption by others.